Monday, July 26, 2010

2010 book 192

Jennifer Donnelly's RevolutionI read and enjoyed Donnelly's previous historical YA novel, A Northern Light, a few years ago, so was pleased to see her new one at ALA. In this one, a young musical New York girl, Andi, traumatized by her younger brother's death and the breakup of her parents' marriage, is dragged to Paris by her father, where she finds an old diary in a guitar case. The diary is written by a revolution-era actress who had a fateful encounter with the doomed prince of France, sending her life on an unexpected path. As Andi is haunted by both the diary and her own past, her own life begins to change. On the whole, this was an excellent--and at times, heartbreaking--novel, though Donnelly was a bit heavy-handed in trying to compare the girls' experiences in a couple of scenes. A-.